Why I Marched in New York

By Daniel Rigney 




I’m no climate scientist, but as a concerned citizen I’ve made an effort in recent years to understand what climate scientists are trying to tell us. The more I’ve learned, the more concerned I’ve become about both the short and longer-term consequences of climate change.

That’s why I recently bought carbon offsets (my new passion) to cover my flight to New York City to participate in the recent People’s Climate March, led by Bill McKibben’s activist group, 350.org.
I didn’t go just to escape Houston’s annual summer steambath, although that was a welcome bonus. I was there to march with 1,500 of my fellow Unitarian Universalists (UU’s) and more than a third of a million others in support of strong United Nations summit initiatives to halt the rise of destructive global climate change.

I’ve previously recounted my personal experience of the march, which I describe as paradoxically both festive and serious-minded. If you’d like a more vivid sense of having been there yourself, I recommend the second half of this brief video. The march will be remembered, I hope, as a landmark event marking a turning point in the nearly inevitable transition from a carbon-based world economy to a more renewable, sustainable one.

Here are some of the serious concerns and motivating hopes that impelled me to march.

REASONS FOR CONCERN

The CO2 Curve

I’ve been personally concerned about climate change ever since I first saw Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and learned about the Keeling Curve. Gore reported that in 1958, climate scientist Charles Keeling began measuring concentrations of CO2 (parts per million molecules of dry air) in earth’s atmosphere. In that year he observed a concentration of 315 ppm. We now know that CO2 levels have been climbing steadily upward ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the late 1700s, from pre-industrial levels of about 280 ppm to this year’s all-time recorded high of 400+ ppm.

You can see in the graph below that this trendline has clearly begun to bend upward. Following its current trajectory, CO2 readings will approach 1000 ppm by 2100, when many of today’s newborns will still be alive to feel the effects.

 

Source: NOAA, Mauna Loa Observatory


Warming of the Atmosphere

Because carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, ice core data reveal a close relationship between CO2 levels and temperature levels through the millennia, as shown below.



Source: Marian Koshland Science Museum of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS)

Scientists expect increases in global temperatures (i.e., global warming) to have wide-ranging impacts, including increasing probabilities of extreme weather events, floods, droughts and famines, species extinctions (reducing earth’s biodiversity), melting icecaps and permafrosts, receding coastlines, and other threats to flora and fauna, including us.

Environmental destabilization would almost surely bring economic, political and military destabilization in its wake, increasing the likelihood of food, water and oil wars and mass migrations around the world, and severely undermining the security of advanced industrial societies like the United States, to say nothing of the world's struggling developing nations.

Thus investments in the transition to clean energy are simulataneously investments in a more stable economic and political future for most of the world's people. Unfortunately, the world's economic markets are notorious for their focus on short-term gains (now measured in nanoseconds) at the expense of long-term foresight. The short-sightedness of economic markets is a severe impediment to the solution of our slow-motion climate crisis, though it's not a market defect most neoclassical economists enjoy talking about.

Taking the longer view, it would be reckless, not “conservative,” of us to ignore the industrial spike in atmospheric CO2, and to delay immediate action to reduce our dependence on the fossil fuels that are driving this trend.

Warming of the Oceans

In the earth’s heat system, our atmosphere absorbs only about 2% of the additional heat it receives from the sun. More than 90% is absorbed by the oceans. Warming seas absorb increasing amounts of CO2, becoming more acidic and killing sea life in the process. Warming causes the ocean’s waters to expand and land ice to melt, raising sea levels at an accelerating rate and threatening coastal cities and agricultral regions with inundation. Even during the recent 15-year “hiatus” or “high plateau” in atmospheric temperatures, the oceans have continued to warm and expand.


  

Fear of Feedback Loops
 
One especially troublesome aspect of climate change is the looming likelihood that further warming will set off several self-amplifying feedback loops, accelerating the warming process and potentially producing runaway and irreversible climate changes beyond our control. Two such feedbacks loops are the albedo (reflectivity) of polar ice and the thawing of permafrosts in the tundras of Siberia and Canada.

Melting ice reduces the reflectivity of the earth’s surface, turning more of that surface into heat-absorbing dark water, which further warms the air and oceans, thereby melting even more ice. A similar vicious cycle will occur if and when the warming atmosphere melts Russian and Canadian frozen ground or permafrost, releasing vast quantities of sequestered carbon dioxide and methane into the air, and setting off further warming and further melting.

Another self-amplifying feedback loop involves the warming of the seas, which increases the volume of heat-trapping water vapor in the atmosphere, further warming the oceans. Warming seas also release from the ocean floor dangerous plumes of gas bubbles from thawing methane clathrate (“flammable ice”), which surface as greenhouse gases and warm the air and seas even further.
It is crucial that we slow or halt these potentially devastating feedback loops before it’s too late. How late is too late? Let’s not wait to find out.

Population x Per Capita Energy Consumption

Compounding these problems is global population growth. The world’s population has now surpassed 7 billion people, and demographers expect it to level off at 9-10 billion later in this century. But it is not just population growth per se that puts a growing burden on Earth’s ecosystems, but also accelerating growth in the world’s energy consumption per capita, as rapidly developing countries such as China and India continue to industrialize. The sooner the world’s economies abandon fossil fuels in favor of renewables, the cleaner and less environmentally destructive human industrial activity will be.

Climate Justice
 
I’m especially concerned that the ill effects of global warming will be felt most severely by those who live closer to the equator than we in the Global North do. Tropical climates will become more unbearable, tropical diseases more prevalent and difficult to eradicate. Floods and rising oceans will inundate large and heavily populated regions of Southeast Asia in particular. It is sadly ironic that those who will suffer the greatest burdens of climate change are the very populations least responsible for creating them, since people who live in the poorest countries consume only a small fraction of fossil fuels per capita as we in the advanced industrial world do. The unfairness of this tragic outcome should trouble anyone with a social conscience.

REASONS FOR HOPE

The Rise of Renewables

 Fortunately for future generations, not all of the climate news is bad. Signs of hope are appearing across the horizon. For instance, prices of renewables -- wind and solar power in particular -- are currently falling rapidly, making these cleaner energy sources economically competitive with fossil fuel in some locales. Al Gore’s recent Rolling Stone article, “The Turning Point,” gives us reason to hope that the transition to renewables is already well underway.

We are also seeing substantial public and private investment in research and development projects, such as the energy initiatives currently underway at MIT and elsewhere, offering hope of breakthroughs in renewable energy technology, improved battery storage, and energy-efficient systems such as mass transit networks and green architecture.

The problem of global warming won’t be solved by a single silver bullet, Bill McKibben argues, but rather by silver buckshot, as a multitude of creative minds around the world work intensely on multiple fronts to create a world in which future civilizations can emerge and evolve.
Each of us can be a part of the solution, whether in our homes, in our work, or in political actions and campaigns supporting climate-smart platforms and initiatives.

But one thing is becoming clear: We can no longer wait for our leaders to lead us. It's up to us now. As one slogan in the New York march phrased it, "We're the ones we've been waiting for."

Shrinking the Human Footprint

Our first priority, of course, must be to shrink our carbon footprints across the full spectrum of human activities, from residential and commercial consumption to industrial and agricultural production to transportation and dietary practices. Fortunately, there are plenty of things we can do to reduce carbon emissions. We can be both personally and politically engaged in support of energy-efficient technologies, higher emission standards  for power plants and motor vehicles, recycling programs, and divestment campaigns. We can reduce the environmental impact of shipping by supporting local producers. We can reduce or eliminate our consumption of beef and other environmentally destructive food sources. Above all, we can seize every available and affordable opportunity to switch from fossil fuels to renewables in the energy choices we make every day.

Supporting Carbon Capture

As we work to reduce our carbon emissions, and to keep fossil fuels such as coal and oil in the ground, we must also endeavor to capture and sequester more atmospheric CO2, putting carbon back into the ground and keeping it there by supporting projects that promote reforestation, restorative agriculture through carbon enrichment of soils, and innovative and promising technologies such as “artificial trees” designed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. I prefer old-fashioned natural trees myself, but I’m for whatever works.
Supporting Carbon Taxes

Another important issue concerns the appropriate pricing of fossil fuels. The external costs of carbon emissions, including their health and environmental costs, are not currently reflected in their prices, and so we are in effect passing these costs, as invisible taxes, onto the shoulders of future generations.

Although it will be a tough sell politically, many of us in the New York march support a carbon tax (or failing that, a cap and trade system) to honestly reflect the real external costs of carbon fuels. This would make renewables relatively cheaper and more price-competitive against fossil fuels, and thereby reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.

To be sure, campaigns to price fossil fuels at levels that reflect their true health and environmental costs will face stiff political opposition from those industries, such as coal, oil and gas, whose economic interests are threatened by the transition to renewable sources of energy. These rich and powerful industries are currently mobilizing well-oiled political lobbies and slick public media campaigns to forestall the inevitable transition to renewables.

But in the end, their efforts cannot prevail against the laws of nature. As greenhouse effects continue to narrow our options for civilizational survival and human well-being, we will have little choice but to respond to changing climate realities by accelerating the transition to renewables. The twilight of the carbon age is fast approaching, and the dawn of an age of sustainable alternatives is on its way.

Supporting Carbon Offsets

Personally, I’ve recently become interested in helping to promote carbon offsets as a potentially significant way to reduce our carbon footprints. Carbon offsets are contributions to the funding of projects (wind, solar, reforestation, restorative farming, etc.) designed to reduce (or offset) the carbon emissions we currently emit into the atmosphere. My wife and I, using a simple and free online carbon calculator, determined that by buying high-quality carbon offsets, we could compensate for our household’s entire carbon footprint (including my plane trip to New York) for just $250 apiece per year. We bought our offsets from a reputable non-profit environmental organization recommended by the online magazine, grist.com.

I think of the purchase of carbon offsets as a voluntary carbon tax, for those who can afford to pay it and want to walk the talk. It’s a modest price our household is willing to pay on behalf of future generations. In effect, well-certified offsets allow us to reduce our household’s annual carbon footprint to net-zero with the press of a “submit payment” button.

In addition, we’ve recently switched to a utility company that sells power generated entirely by wind, further offsetting our carbon footprint and becoming net-negative in our household’s emissions. It’s a good feeling to be fighting global warming on the home front, however we may choose to do this -- whether it's by driving less, resetting our thermostats, weatherizing, insulating, solarizing, composting, replacing old bulbs with LEDs, using  Energy Star appliances, or buying carbon offsets. Everyone can do something from home.

Sources of Cultural and Spiritual Hope

Thus far I’ve emphasized the economic and material dimensions of the climate issue, but there are important cultural and spiritual dimensions as well. Many of us are coming to question the relentlessly materialistic, crudely selfish and acquisitive values that underlie unrestrained consumer capitalism. Our current consumer economy is continually pushing us toward ever greater accumulations of “stuff,” and valuing quantity of wealth over quality of life.

Philosophical and religious wisdom traditions, at their best, restrain our impulse to live mindlessly and irresponsibly in the pursuit of material accumulation. In a world in which the fundamentalist wings of religious faiths seem continually at war with each other, I was inspired in New York to see the progressive wings of the world’s major faiths converging, both literally and figuratively, on the issue of climate justice and the moral imperative for a compassionate response to suffering. We of many faiths were marching together, in the same direction, in the shared desire to build a more equitable and sustainable world – a world worth living in – for future generations.

I was especially proud to be marching alongside some 1,500 of my fellow progressive Unitarian Universalists, or UUs. Coming from Houston, de facto capital of the western hemisphere’s carbon economy, I was a welcome oddity in a crowd consisting mainly of eastern seaboarders. Several were pleasantly surprised to see that even Texas was in the house.

As UUs, we’re committed to what we call the Seventh Principle, or respect for the web of interdependence of which we are all a part. Our denomination has recently voted to divest fossil fuel stocks, and our Ministry for Earth advocates for the achievement of UN climate goals, offering several programs (Green Sanctuary, UU Climate Action Teams, Commit2Respond and others) in support of a just and expeditious transition to a more renewable and sustainable world.

Marching in New York with a large religious contingent that included representatives of many other traditions – Christians of many denominations, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and others – we shared a rare moment of interfaith solidarity with one another. It did a heart good.

But What Has Posterity Ever Done for Us?

Now that I’m older and slowly realizing I won’t be around forever, I find myself doing more things with the well-being of future generations in mind. Eric Erikson calls this attitude “generativity.” Others call it “giving back” or “paying it forward.” I’ve found that doing good things for the sake of future generations, and planting saplings in whose full shade I may never live to sit, can be a fulfilling way to live a life.

Some years ago, the economist Robert Heilbroner posed the challenging question, “What has posterity ever done for us?” How we answer that question may tell us a great deal about what kind of people we are, and whether our species can look forward to a future worth having.

Many of the children born today will likely live to see the 22^nd century. I want to leave them a sustainable world, and a world worth living in. That’s why I marched in New York, and that’s why I’m returning home renewed, sustained, and wanting to be a bigger part of the solution.

DR

-- originally posted in Danagram on opensalon.com



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